Katie Lansdale

Multi award-winning recording artist Katie Melua has announced an extensive 45-date headline 2020 tour, including 18 UK & Eire dates. The announcement of the tour coincides with news of a ‘Live In Concert’ 2xCD album featuring Gori Women’s Choir, recorded at London’s Central Hall, Westminster, in December 2018. Gori Women’s Choir first worked with Katie on the silver-certified 2016 album ‘In Winter’. That album was recorded in Georgia, and commanded some of the finest reviews of her career with the Sunday Times describing it as “bewitching…ravishing…spellbinding” and the Independent as “exquisite” and “remarkable.”

English listeners went mad for Katie Melua with the release of her debut album in late 2003. Issued domestically in June 2004, Call Off the Search posits the lovely Melua pristinely in between pop, adult contemporary, and traditional American musical forms, with savvy marketing handling the finishing touches. (Think Norah Jones.) It's a comfortable, lightly melodic affair that drinks red wine safely in the middle of the road. Raised in Soviet Georgia and the United Kingdom, Melua has a beguiling accent that colors the ends of her phrases, adding character to her velvety, if occasionally only satisfactory singing voice.

With combined U.K. album sales of nearly three million copies, Georgian-born Katie Melua has quietly become one of the biggest-selling female artists of the decade. Without the media profile of Britney Spears, the powerhouse vocals of Anastacia, or the critical acclaim of Dido, her success has been based purely on old-fashioned songs that have managed to have appeal beyond the usual folk-pop market. Indeed, just like her biggest influence, Eva Cassidy, who appears here on a posthumous cover of "What a Wonderful World," Melua's soothing and jazz-tinged tones found an audience through repeated plays on Terry Wogan's BBC Radio 2 show. So the fact that the majority of The Katie Melua Collection never really moves past first gear shouldn't come as any surprise.

Katie Webster is a powerful singer who can really belt out the blues, but perhaps her greatest skill is her two-handed piano solos. On this CD she is featured on a fairly wide range of material within the idiom including a zydeco-flavored blues, a sincere blues ballad ("It's Mighty Hard"), a couple of Motownish soul numbers, a rock and rollish "Those Lonely Lonely Nights" (on which she shares vocals with Lonnie Brooks) and, best of all, a variety of basic blues. Although she also contributes some atmospheric chordal organ, it is Katie Webster's piano playing that gives her music its most distinctive personality. A fun set.